What is Chronicles of Elyria? We first learned about the game and its goal to redefine the MMORPG genre back in 2015. Since then, CoE has been developing steadily, especially after the huge influx of capital gained through Kickstarter and then on-site crowdfunding. Folks could follow the progress through numerous dev blogs, videos, and even the chance to test bits of gameplay at various PAXs. Some bits of that development, however, have raised questions; prospective players have voiced concerns about the pay-to-win and gankbox stigmas, the complex tribe system, and the admittedly broad scope of the game.

I sat down with Executive Producer Vye Alexander and CEO/Creative Director Jeromy Walsh at PAX West to discuss these issues and more.

Subs, P2W, and B2P

One of the two stigmas that players worry about with Chronicles of Elyria is “pay-to-win.” Alexander and Walsh both addressed these issues. Alexander explained that CoE will be using a different type monetization: As an indie studio, she noted, they can focus on doing right by the community that has backed them as well as the vision of the game instead if being beholden to a big publisher.

“We don’t have to worry about a publisher trying to turn us into a microtransaction game,” she said. “We can have our unique business plan that we have instead of a subscription fee, instead of microtransaction free-to-play model.” In particular, she doesn’t like subscriptions because “when players no longer get equity, value out of the game, they shouldn’t have to pay for it anymore.” Forgoing the sub model gets rid of that model’s propensity to add in “grindy, time-wasting kind of stuff to try and keep that perpetuity of experience, but you aren’t really necessarily doing anything interesting.”

“In Chronicles of Elyria we want people to be in the world because the world is better when people are there,” she told me. “Massively multiplayer game — that’s important. A lot of MMOs have turned into an online task list simulator with chat rooms.” Chat channels, she argues, are something that everybody turns off because people don’t actually want to be around annoying or even toxic players. Instead, people hang out just with a few friends.

As for microtransactions, besides emphasizing that everything needs to be craftable in game, Walsh explained,

“As a studio, if our business model is in selling cosmetics items, that’s how we as a studio have to spend our time, and I don’t want our team after launch spending all of our time creating sunglasses and hats and things like that. I want us to be spending our time creating new content, and new stories, and new technology — and things that are accessible to everybody. The microtransaction model doesn’t work for us.”

So what model works for CoE? Walsh told me buy-to-play is the studio’s favorite and that you can’t easily be pay-to-win in a B2P. But this model has one problem: Money comes with the release of expansions. And expansions mean holding back content until there is enough to make it worth paying for. “Expansions are actually almost diametrically opposed to what we are trying to do,” he stated. “We are trying to create a living, breathing world where every day the world is different and there is new content and new story and things like that.” Instead, the idea is that people will buy new life spans for their characters as we’ve previously covered.

That said, Walsh said there will be fundraising until game launches to build the world up. “This world would be so much richer and so much better if, on launch day when you come into the game, the settlements and the domains that exist are already run by players,” he said. “The king is an actual player, and the dukes and counts are players, and they are vying for you to come and join their settlements. They want you to be their citizens.”

What about the fact that those people buying the titles are gaining advantage by paying more? Walsh reminded that titles are not permanent and everything can change: “The title can be taken away, they can be assassinated, revolution can happen. We let every king know when they back that you are going to lose your title at some point. Someday somebody is going to overthrow you.” He also emphasized that players can also earn titles without spending any money; they can earn these through the influence system, which rewards players for helping others on forums, recruiting friends, and engaging with the community.

Redefining PvP

The second stigma that worries many prospective players is that CoE could devolve into a gankbox. How is Soulbound Studios addressing this? Walsh said some of that concern comes from the misconception about CoE being a PvP-heavy game – it’s not, but it is, he argues.

“We like to say we have both the most and the least PvP of any game ever,” he explained. His position is that if you define PvP as hitting someone with weapon, Chronicles of Elyria isn’t much of a PvP game. You can walk up and hit anyone, but according to him, “it’s not going to happen as often as people think it will because we, as designers, are adding a lot of consequences to that type of behavior in the world because we don’t want that to be common place.” When it comes to physical violence, he said, the studio “will continue to iterate on the punishments and penalties until [Soulbound has] it tuned to the point that it’s something that exists, is happening, but it’s not so prevalent that people feel unsafe going outside in the world. ”

Instead, CoE defines PvP differently. “We definite PvP as a player’s ability to impact other players. And that can happen in so many different ways in Chronicles of Elyria,” he told me. Between contract systems, player-run governments and settlements, resource management, the gossip and reputation system, and the economy, you can affect other players in so many ways – even “religiously, socially, economically, and politically.”

Walsh said other similar games fail because they don’t give players recourse to combat griefing, but in CoE, folks can share info and blacklist troublemakers. And since there are survival elements in the game, if there is no where to call home, those griefers could have a very difficult time with surviving on their own.

Alexander addressed the first. “We’re still working on finding a lot of the characteristics of each of the tribes — what exactly their architecture looks like, what exactly their clothing styles are going to look like, what sort of weapons they would use. It started with trying to figure out what biomes they would have lived in and how they would have adapted to that.” Now the team will go back and start incorporating cultural elements like clothing, hairstyles, face painting, masks, and so on.

“We wanted to make sure everything had a natural, evolutionary reason for existing in the world,” she explained. Instead of just making something up on the spot, the team has taken the idea of moving a common ancestor around the world and having groups evolve depending on the area they moved to. What had to happen to adapt to live in that particular environment? Walsh said that the only good and fair way to create bloodlines and tribes was to start from scratch.

“In some cases our tribes do resemble cultural or ethnic groups on our planet, but that’s because the people in those regions evolved very similar to the way that they did in Elyria. And it wasn’t that we were trying. In fact we were explicit not to do so; in some cases we evolved in such a way that we were almost on the verge of stereotypes, and in those cases we actually went back and flipped it around.”

That entailed eschewing the stereotype of larger, stronger races being dimwitted and instead made them some of the most intelligent. “We didn’t want people to fall into those stereotypes,” Walsh said. “We wanted people to be aware of the fact that we were cognizant that those stereotypes might exist and we didn’t want to go that direction. So any relationships between the tribes in Elyria and ethnic groups on earth are solely coincidental based on the fact that we evolved on earth much the same way that they did on Elyria.”

Can all the little bits turn into an MMO?

Chronicles of Elyria has been pushed back from a December release this year, and instead there will be smaller feeder titles like a MUD developed first. There is also the concern that between these projects and the fact that all playable demos have been focused on such a small scope that the devs might struggle expanding to a massive size of the full MMORPG.

As for the pushed back date, Alexander said that one reason is that it took took longer to hire folks in some areas than hoped, particularly in engineering. And in regard to the MUD and the small demonstrations at the conventions, she told me that it was a purposeful move to provide “a very detailed experience highlighting just a couple features.” The key is getting the feature to work well on a micro scale before moving it to the macro scale. As she put it,

“Each of the things we’ve been showing off so far has been extremely foundational for how we’ve been developing the game. We are trying to work on things in the right order. We’re trying to work smart because we are a small team and we need to be cognizant of how we are utilizing our resources. We can’t just rehash things and rebuild and refactor things all the time. We need to make sure we’re getting it right. So we’ve taken our time to make sure we’re giving it the care that it deserves”

In other words, she said, “We want to get these experiences out early so we can learn about them. There are still things we can learn and improve by getting feedback from our players.” Though the experiences have been more or less cordoned off and not open-world experiences, they are demonstrating how the devs want the game to look and feel. It’s also demonstrating what has been have developed so far. Additionally, doing it piecemeal instead of all at once isolates what the team needs to learn, from combat to parkour movement and now mounted combat. The MUD and other projects will only help that process, and note that they won’t bee monetized, just available as development tools open to the backers.

Walsh concurred. “Our pre-alpha experiences are really about allowing us to develop the game in a way that we can get feedback from the players as early as possible.” These small-scale experiences have apparently been valuable to the team in providing both feedback from players and gathering input on the mechanisms. “Even PAX for us is all about usability testing and feedback,” he told me. “We’ve learned a lot of lessons at this PAX West about camera angle and perspective.”

Elyria’s end goal

Will the game meet its goal of changing the genre? Walsh made the point that the term MMORPG doesn’t even necessarily fit the game to begin with. He said of CoE, “It is not a massively multiplayer online game; it’s a massively multiplayer world. It is very, very much a living, breathing thing,” with its goal of allowing people to be connected in an organic way. CoE will be more of a civilization, with player economy and player government.

“People can find their role in the world and they can be a part of that to the extent that would like to be,” Alexander explained. This includes being just a farmer, armorer, tax collector, adventurer, or what have you. “We really want people to feel like they have a place in the world, a reason to log on. The world is always changing because of decisions players are making.” She emphasized that folks will play because the world is living, not because of the need to grind:

“That perpetuity of experience comes not just from the fact that there’s a bunch of activities to do — we don’t want grind. Instead it’s form the fact that the world is vibrant, and alive, and you are a part of it. Your character matters.”

How much will you matter? Decisions by rulers can have massive effects, but even a farmer who logs off to go on vacation for a couple weeks will affect the food supply for the area. In perspective, that may not be something that entices everyone!

Finally, the Soulbound Studios duo told me that that development is going very well. “We are at a place where a lot of our foundational elements are in,” Alexander told me. Those elements include both the engine and art style. Post-Kickstarter funding has also reportedly done very well, more than doubling the initial amount raised. With that, the velocity of development is even able to speed up.

Massively Overpowered was on the ground in Seattle for PAX West 2017, bringing you expert MMO coverage on Ashes of Creation, Ship of Heroes, Dual Universe, and everything else on display at the latest Penny Arcade Expo!

so it is a revolution simulator, where lives don’t matter, people stuff is not important, except for hurting other players. I can understand the lives is like lining quarters up to play mortal combat back when I was growing up but so you get old and die, you get murdered and die and lose all your stuff, it is going to be like a bunch of baboons screaming they are king of the mountain on top of heaps of broken bodies and stolen loot.

Then you take the stuff that is usually safe from looting and add that to the player’s corpse.

“The title can be taken away, they can be assassinated, revolution can happen. We let every king know when they back that you are going to lose your title at some point. Someday somebody is going to overthrow you.”

This statement is why the game mechiances reference later are not going to work they way they expect they will.

Walsh said other similar games fail because they don’t give players recourse to combat griefing, but in CoE, folks can share info and blacklist troublemakers. And since there are survival elements in the game, if there is no where to call home, those griefers could have a very difficult time with surviving on their own.

It feels like shadow bane all over again, very well built game that non of the developers took into account that some people are no better than poo tossing baboons.

What they will have a bunch of kingdoms of people using meta to control the game looting and pillaging anyone stupid enough to join the game after those groups get a choke hold on the game.

Players will race to the level cap, then farm some nubes. I think the joke was on rubes back in shadow bane. Note none of us paid to play shadowbane there was no backing at that point and only a book edition later on that gave some people hope that the griefers would not want to pay to play. They did using stolen credit cards and hacked accounts. Most of them did not even play video games before shadow bane. Every time I see this game it looks more like someone is trying to make a worse meta than eve and shadow bane. In eve at least their are fun parts for most people. Well hopefully they figure out what their target audience and some how manage to last at least a year the design of systems is really high quality if the content of the design is really short sighted of the people that are going to sign up to play.

yea but its not really that much of a problem since its a 1-2 year problem everyone faces also since your next life basically picks up where your old self left off its not too much of an issue its more of an immersion thing

Actually it has always been that one spark lasts 10-14 months with no deaths. Deaths tend to take off a couple days (depending on your fame). Also, your soul grows faster skill-wise in what you have been working on. It use to be that you would continue as your kid at the age of 15 (even if you died at 70) but they removed this for many reasons.

But..but.. we need “sheeps”… We need to give the illusion to the ganker that he is a respectable fighter while we protect him from respectable fights… sorry no pve option for you.. we need you on the pvp server, you are our “content”..

The first is their PvP punishments will never stop those who want a cheap troll thrill. Then again, no such system exists in the world… but it’s always worse with PvP involved. As to how much they can reduce that, it is a great question. However, given that murdering people shortens their character life and has a real impact on their wallet: That’s a no-go to me. I would like to see some metric of random gank not affecting that, especially given the intended offline character persistence in the world.

The second is that they already offered some measure of P2W. The advantages from the $1k+ packages… not cool with me. I understand they need money, but man is that a turn off from playing.

They always say the right things.. but so did SOE with EqNext (and much the same).
And just like with EqNext, if they can manage to deliver on half of all those claims, then it will surely be the best mmorpg ever made…. but talk is cheap, lets see some proof.

While I’m very interested in this game I’m not backing it for two reasons.
One if the devs aren’t super skilled and careful this game could go sideways in an instant.
Second this is yet another game where they wont show you the prices until after you create an account with them, and I simply wont support any dev who resorts to this sort of blatantly manipulative marketing department bs.

I don’t believe any game, outside of good reputation developers (of which there are maybe…2), on release won’t be pay to win until a few weeks or months after it’s 1.0 date. Until that point it is simply lip service to sell more founder packs of bullshit.

The reason the big ones are dumb is because they already have the advantage of physical strength it would be overkill to make them good with magic or intelligent, it’s not a stereotype it’s a game mechanic.

If they are bigger but not stronger it’s fine, otherwise they are unbalancing their game from the start.

Their pvp excuse is not convincing, it’s pretty easy to give someone who was just ganked a buff that keeps him from being ganked again, making the gankers compete for their ganking, the reason no one ever takes that route is because they want the gankers, they serve as natural lockouts time sinks, they can prevent you from doing content or slow down your progress.

Funny. IMHO this is by far the most P2W game I have seen. I believe they support RMT as well as selling everything in the game before launch including the purchase of land, titles, buildings, mounts, siege machines, resources, weapons. It’s an utter joke.

And their whole fall back is that it’s not P2W because you can lose them. Great, one guy gets a machine gun and I get a stick, but if I beat him I can have his machine gun so that’s fair.

Not to even mention the 3 month no wipe headstart for high level backers.

Is it pay to win? Yes. Is EVE online pay to win? Yes. Is EVE a bad game? No.

This so called “headstart” lets call it exposition is for the nobility to lay the foundation of a world so its not completely empty, this gives the nobility time to prepare against griefers and set a smooth launch, everyone with exposition points gets to participate in it, exposition points can be purchased with 10$. If you think this is not for you and you are not one of the 10$ high level backers, feel free to watch.

Typical misleading info from this bunch… No.. $10 does not get you into the start of the 3 month Headstart. To do that you must have pledged at a Tier that grants Exposition Access. Currently the “lowest” tier that grants this is the Bloodline tier at $125

That’d be nice… if I trusted those ‘nobles’ any more than reaching under the back end of a squatting dog. I don’t. I don’t trust them at all. There’s no reason for me to, no investment in them as players, and no chance to get to know them before playing after their months of ‘setup.’

Given that they have a huge amount of control over what people can do in game, from all we have been told, that is a huge and fatal flaw.

To be fair I can see how this would turn some people off but since I have no interest in the nobility aspect anyway it isn’t an issue for me at all. I’m more then happy to let others set up a word for me to help bring order/chaos to.

Agree. I will be there to master my character and descendants, not the village/region/world. I compete against myself. I am glad other players are willing to take on the headaches of ruling the world. If they can’t wait and will pay for it, even better.